complementary and alternative medicine
oracknows | March 22, 2011For years now, one of the major themes of this blog, between laying the cluestick on anti-vaccine loons and examining quackery and pseudoscience in all its forms, has been to examine the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia. The reason, as you might expect, is because, as an academic surgeon myself who runs his own laboratory, seeing pseudoscience and religious quackery such as reiki, therapeutic touch, naturopathy, and even homeopathy and anthroposophic medicine, has in the past usually disturbed me far more than seeing this sort of nonsense in private practice settings…
oracknows | March 21, 2011Here's something for you all to check out. Trine Tsouderos, the journalist from The Chicago Tribune who's distinguished herself as being one of the few reporters who "gets it" when it comes to quackery and the anti-vaccine movement (just put her name in the search box of this blog for some examples) will be hosting a web chat about vaccines featuring none other than Dr. Paul Offit, one of the gutsiest (if not the gutsiest) defender of vaccine science out there. The chat will occur here at noon CDT today. Questions can be submitted in advance to Tsouderos at ttsouderos@tribune.com.
Head on…
oracknows | March 21, 2011I graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in the late 1980s. Back then, U. of M. was really hardcore about science back then, so much so that it was viewed as seriously old-school. No new (at the time) organ system approach for us! During the first two years, ever four weeks, like clockwork, we'd have what was called a concurrent examination, which basically meant that we were tested (with multiple choice tests, of course!) on every subject on the same morning. At the time I was there, the medical curriculum for the first two years had been fairly constant for quite some time…
oracknows | March 18, 2011
Many are the times when I've pointed out that many "complementary and alternative medicine" CAM or "integrative medicine" (IM) modalities are very much more based on religion or mystical ideas akin to religion than on anything resembling science. I realize that my saying this is nothing new, but every so often I see something that reminds me of this concept to the point that, self-important logorrheic blogger that I am, I can't resist commenting, particularly when I'm amused by the story. This particular story is amusing, to me at least.
You see, it's about what happens when one religion…
oracknows | March 17, 2011You know, I really know the feeling described in this song:
I really do. How about you?
oracknows | March 17, 2011People believe a lot of wacky things. Some of these things are merely amusingly wacky, while others are dangerously wacky. Among the most dangerously wacky of things that a large number of people believe in is the idea that germ theory is invalid. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that among the most dangerously wacky of nonsense is germ theory denialism; i.e., the denial that germs are the cause of disease. Few theories in medicine or science are supported as strongly by such a huge amount of evidence from multiple disciplines that converge on the idea that microorganisms cause disease,…
oracknows | March 15, 2011There are times when I'm wrong again and again.
No, I'm certainly not referring to my writings about vaccines which, as much as anti-vaccine loons like to claim they're wrong, are not. Nor am I referring to my writings about "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM). While it's possible that I've made mistakes here and there, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about being utterly and demonstrably wrong, something that, although it might happen in my real life with distressing frequency, is pretty rare on the blog.
Then came Dr. Oz.
You remember Dr.…
oracknows | March 10, 2011Not too long ago, I posted a rather amusing little video called Immunize! One line in the song that amused me went something like this:
Don't give Chuck Norris shots!
That'd be dim.
Chuck need vaccines? Naw
Vaccines need him?
Actually, not too surprisingly, it turns out that the word "dim" should be applied to Chuck Norris, particularly when it comes to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), also known as "integrative medicine" (IM), or, as I call it, "integrating" quackery with real medicine. Of course, as fellow Sb bloggers have demonstrated, Chuck's well-toned biceps aren't the…
oracknows | March 9, 2011Via Stupid Evil Bastard, here's a great cartoon that points out the red flags that indicate most of the major red flags of quackery (click to embiggen and see the whole cartoon):
I have to admit. The main ones are all there.
oracknows | March 7, 2011Over the years, I've pointed out just how horrible British libel laws are. If there is a set of laws more designed to be used and abused by the wealthy to silence criticism, it's British libel laws. Indeed, I was pointing out the travesty that is British libel law in the context of David Irving's use of it to try to silence Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt years before Simon Singh became a cause celebre in the skeptical community after the British Chiropractic Association sued him on the flimsiest of grounds. Fortunately, the BCA lost, but only after coming very close to winning and costing…
oracknows | March 5, 2011Due to my activities at the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting in San Antonio, somehow I didn't manage to crank out a bit of that Insolence, Respectful or Not-So-Respectful, that you all crave. So, given that this is Friday, I thought I'd to a "rerun" of a bit of classic woo. This one's a little newer than the reruns I usually do, only two and a half years old. So, if you've been reading less than two years, it's new to you!
In the nearly two years of its existence, I have strived to feature only the finest and most outrageous woo that I can find. It's mostly been medical quackery but…
oracknows | March 4, 2011Due to my activities at the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting in San Antonio, somehow I didn't manage to crank out a bit of that Insolence, Respectful or Not-So-Respectful, that you all crave. So, given that this is Friday, I thought I'd to a "rerun" of a bit of classic woo. This one's a little newer than the reruns I usually do, only a little less than two years old. So, if you've been reading less than two years, it's new to you! Maybe I'll even post another one later.
Ever since I started this little vanity bit known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, lo, these nearly three years ago, when I…
oracknows | March 2, 2011The other day, I wrote to express my disappointment with Dr. Kevin Pho, of KevinMD, for posting credulous crap about alternative medicine. I noted in an addendum that he responded with a comment that in essence said that he posts things he "doesn't necessarily agree with myself to promote discussion and debate":
Orac,
I appreciate the critique. As readers of this blog know, I often post pieces here I don't necessarily agree with myself to promote discussion and debate. Your concerns are certainly valid, and will be taken into consideration as I choose future pieces.
Best,
Kevin
My initial…
oracknows | February 28, 2011Say it ain't so, Dr. Pho!
Back when I first started blogging over six years ago, one of the first medical blogs I came across was KevinMD, the weblog of one Dr. Kevin Pho. Back then, of course, Dr. Pho's blog wasn't anywhere near the medblogging juggernaut that it is now, a part of Medpage Today. Indeed, Kevin was one of my early influences, although, as you can see, I never managed to get the whole brevity in writing thing down. Or the whole commercial savvy thing, either. Or the team blogging thing, either. Respectful Insolence was and remains a one man operation (or one Plexiglass box of…
oracknows | February 28, 2011Now here's something that can be used to counter the idiocy of Mike Adams Don't Inject Me: ZDoggMD's Immunize:
Take that, Mike Adams!
oracknows | February 27, 2011Naturopathy has been a recurrent topic on this blog. The reasons should be obvious. Although homeopathy is the one woo to rule them all in the U.K. and much of Europe, here in the U.S. homeopathy is not nearly as big a deal. Arguably, some flavor of naturopathy is the second most prevalent "alternative medical system" here, after chiropractic of course, and perhaps duking it out with traditional Chinese medicine, although naturopathy does embrace TCM as part of the armamentarium of dubious medical systems that it uses. In any case, some sixteen states and five Canadian provinces license…
oracknows | February 25, 2011It's Friday. That means I'm in the mood for something more amusing. In the past, I used to use Fridays to have some fun with some particularly outrageous bit of woo, such as quantum homeopathy or DNA activation. Lately, I haven't done Your Friday Dose of Woo nearly as often as I used to, but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate good woo when I see it. However, some bits of craziness just aren't suitable for YFDoW not so much because they aren't crazy enough but because of the deadly seriousness of the intent or because they lack that light-hearted bit of looniness that characterizes the…
oracknows | February 16, 2011$37 million.
If you were a medical school dean or a hospital administrator and had $37 million for a project, how woud you use it? What would you build? What would you renovate? What research projects would you fund? What infrastructure improvements would you make? Yes, $37 million is a lot of green. Back at my old job, if memory serves me correctly, a whole new addition to the cancer center that nearly tripled its square footage cost somewhere in the range of $35-40 million. True, that was nearly ten years ago; so building the same building might now cost more than $37 million. My point…
oracknows | February 13, 2011I've made no secret about the fact that I am not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). I consider it a useless, redundant center within the National Institutes of Health because it does nothing that could't be done as well or better in the institutes and centers of the NIH that existed before woo-friendly Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) created NCCAM's precursor and then saw to it that it grew to a full center, with a budget in the $125 million a year range. Personally, if something has to be cut fromt the government in this time of fiscal austerity, I…
oracknows | February 12, 2011It's been pointed out to me that our old pal David Kirby, perhaps the cleverest antivaccine propagandist out there, is back at (where else?) The Huffington Post (a.k.a. HuffPo) asking why The Autism-Vaccine Debate: Why It Won't Go Away (short answer: because opportunists like Kirby have teamed with believers in pseudoscience to keep fanning the flames of this manufactroversy whenever they fade to embers). I've been debating whether it's worthwhile to produce a response to his disingenuously slimy arguments yet again, given that Kirby's being even more disingenuously slimy than usual. In the…